BONOKOSKI: Trudeau boots it out of Ottawa as SNC Lavalin woes build

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigns with Richard T. Lee,(behind Trudeau) the Liberal candidate in the upcoming Burnaby South byelection on Feb. 10, 2019. (The Canadian Press)

So, our self-proclaimed feminist prime minister demotes profoundly one of the strongest women in his cabinet for allegedly failing to genuflect to his wishes — an indigenous lawyer, no less — and then flies out of town to Vancouver to dodge the flack.

Is this smart politics, or is this cowardice?

While in British Columbia, ostensibly stumping for the Liberal candidate facing off against NDP leader Jagmeet Singh in the Feb. 25 byelection in Burnaby South, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would not directly answer questions regarding the kicking of his former justice minister and attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, down the ladder to Minister of Veteran Affairs, nor comment on the swirling controversy surrounding Quebec’s SNC Lavalin.

No, he had an important announcement to make on “affordable housing” in Vancouver, which is an impossibility to anyone seeking shelter there.

But it was as good an excuse as any to get out of Ottawa and, while other high-profilers like Trade Minister Jim Carr were strangely there in Vancouver, Wilson-Raybould was not in the crowd, despite being in the city.

Then the federal ethics commissioner announced the NDP’s request to have the entire affair investigated would be honoured, leaving the PM to say, reluctantly no doubt, that he “welcomed” the probe.

He also brought up Wilson-Raybould for the first time.

“I respect her view that, due to privilege, she can’t comment or add on matters recently before the media. I also highlight that we’re bound by cabinet confidentiality. In our system of governance, her presence in cabinet should speak for itself,” Trudeau said.

“I continue to have full confidence in Jody.”

The nation’s capital is a political viper’s pit at the best of times, but throw in a controversy, and out come the anonymous dirty-work gang.

There was, for example, a heavily-played story with Liberal “insiders” claiming Wilson-Raybould had become a “thorn in the side of cabinet,” that she openly “berated” fellow ministers, and that she was not one to be trusted.

On Wednesday, members of the Liberal-dominated justice committee will hold an emergency meeting to decide whether to call an inquiry to grill Wilson-Raybould and the supposed go-easy-on-Lavalin collective in the PMO, including Trudeau’s puppet master and principal secretary, Gerald Butts.

It has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the go-ahead.

The Twitter world played its role in Wilson-Raybould demonization, aside from Celina Caesar-Chavannes, a backbench Liberal MP from Whitby, whose near-midnight tweet read, “As someone on the inside, who knows @Puglaas

(Wilson-Raybould), I can tell you that she is fierce, smart and unapologetic. When women speak out and up, they are always going toe be labelled. Go ahead and Label away. We are not going anywhere.”

What is not good news for Trudeau, aside from the smallish groundswell of support for Wilson-Raybould, is the fact that the public is becoming increasingly interested in whether Trudeau and his senior PMO advisors tried to pressure her to tell the Prosecution Office to make an out-of-court deal with the engineering monolith, Lavalin, to avoid going to trial on corruption charges.

It would be legal to quietly do this, of course, if not for the original Globe and Mail exclusive that blew the doors open and basically created the scandal that is now unfolding in a painful but delicious slow-as-molasses manner.

If the federal election were nine weeks away, rather than nine months, it would be likely too late for the Trudeau Liberals to recover.

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